It’s cool that the recipes books details the process, but you would
think that this would be posted in big bold letters somewhere since it
is for the good of the community. My plugin adds a page expiration
method to expire all pages cached under an action or controller. Here
are two examples and thier results.

expire_each_page(:controller => ‘blog’, :action => ‘view’)
This will expire all pages recursively under public/blog/view. (ie
public/blog/view.html and publice/blog/view/2/old/4.html)
expire_each_page(:controller => ‘blog’)
This will expire all pages recursively under public/blog/ (ie
public/blog.html and publice/blog/view/2/old/4.html)

So let me get this straight. All I need to release a plugin is an svn
repository. I then just add the link to the wiki andhttp://www.agilewebdevelopment.com/plugins
If I do the above rails will automatically find the plugin?

Yup, my goal is to make that database. The first step is to get the
content over from the wiki, then get the plugin installer script to
know about my database, link people from the wiki to the new site,
and finally end up with a better resource for the plugins than an
easily-spammable wiki page.

My site is open for adding and editing (everyone please feel free to
add to the content from the content in the wiki!) and I’ll play the
part of editor to make sure the information is good. I’m also very
interested in any ideas people have for making it a better resource.

As you say, plugins are a major feature of rails, and it’s time we
have a great database for them.

Thanks for the comments! These are excellent ideas and would make
great additions to the site. I’ll mull 'em over a bit and see what I
can crank out myself vs. where I would need some help.

I was thinking of having a checkout of each plugin repository,
updating them on a regular basis, and publishing some sort of delta
via RSS. Having the plugin author come by and do that (with better
info, no doubt), like RAA does it, is a much better idea.

A couple of weeks back I started in on a similar project but got
sidetracked - very glad to see someone is taking this on.

My primary driver for having a better resource than the wiki was for
me as a plugin author to be able to communicate with people who are
using my plugins.

A dedicated mailing list is too heavy (imho) if all you want to say
is “hey, I just fixed a bug” and I’m reluctant to spam the rails list
every time I have news about something only a small fraction of
people are interested in (it’s not so much that it’s rude, it’s more
that the messages are likely to be lost in the sheer volume of the
rails list).

So, what be cool is:

a) allow plugin authors to have accounts on your site so that they
can self-manage the data (such as homepage, latest version. svn url
etc).
b) allow plugin authors to add news snippets - just a few hundred
characters of text with an optional URL field that could point to a
blog entry (or somesuch) that explains the news in greater depth.
c) allow people to subscribe to RSS feeds on your site to pull in
news for a given plugin (it would be very cool if the feed URL
could allow you to pull in news for multiple plugins of your choosing)

and finally:

d) a plugin which users could install that (in development mode)
displayed the plugin data (homepage etc) for each installed plugin
in their project as well as a link to look at the latest news for the
plugin (or even the text of the news itself). It could slurp the RSS
feed from your site and present it in pretty html.

Anyhow, that’s the sort of thing that would make me happy, dunno if
anyone else wants it tho.

If you think that those are good features but you don’t have the time
to implement them then feel free to ping me off the list and I’ll see
if I can scrape together some time to lend a hand.

I’m preparing my plugin for release and noticed the script/plugin
scraper
requires your plugin svn repository to adopt an undocumented naming
scheme
AFAIK. Your repository path must have “/plugins/” and can’t have
“/browser/”
in the string. Also rubyforge svn links have some issue I haven’t
tracked
down yet. In any case, there’s more than just adding your plugin to the
wiki
and agilewebdevelopment.com if you want your plugin to be qualified for
RailsDay.